AZTECS WANT REVENGE VS. COWBOYS

Embarrassing 9-point first half at Wyoming still on minds of SDSU players a month later

Wyoming at Aztecs

Today: 7 p.m. at Viejas Arena

On the air: TWCSN; 101-FM, 600-AM

San Diego State coach Steve Fisher likes to give his team a daily thought, usually a pithy quotation from someone famous. Monday’s was from Winston Churchill: “It is not enough that we do our best; sometimes we must do what is required.”

But really, he needn’t have bothered with the famed British statesman and orator for motivation, not with seventh-place Wyoming coming to Viejas Arena. What is required is a single number.

Nine.

It is 20 minutes of basketball that will forever live in infamy at SDSU, the lowest point total by any team for any half in the 14-year history of the Mountain West, the lowest point in an Aztec season with Everest expectations.

The then-No. 15 Aztecs were playing at 7,222 feet, the highest elevation in Division I. They didn’t have point guard Xavier Thames, a late scratch with his bad back. They were playing in the remote outpost of Laramie at the Arena-Auditorium, aka the “Dome of Doom,” a venue where they historically struggle.

“Altitude and travel and playing in freezing-cold weather and playing in the Double-A had nothing to do with how we played,” Fisher said of the 58-45 loss on Jan. 19. “We had a lot to do with how we played up there, starting with me. We got taken to the woodshed.”

“The worst loss I’ve ever taken,” senior Chase Tapley said a few days afterward. “I mean, nine points in the first half? It was just bad. It was embarrassing. I was embarrassed for everything — the effort, the scoring, how we played, our attitude, everything.”

It is still hard to fathom how a program that had never scored fewer than 38 points in a game in four decades of Division I basketball and that still managed 49 in brutal conditions on the deck of an aircraft carrier in November ended up with single digits in a half indoors. But it happened. Somehow.

The Aztecs made 4 of 24 shots in the half and were 0 of 8 on 3s. They had no assists. They had eight turnovers.

Had it not been for DeShawn Stephens’ three-point play with 1:03 left, they would have scored six.

And of those three baskets, only two actually went through the net. One came on a questionable (and merciful) goaltending call.

Afterward Fisher called it “as bad a team as I’ve had, the way we played in the first half.” (And he coached a 5-23 team that went 0-14 in conference his first year at SDSU.)

The first thing the players did on the flight home: Run their fingers down the schedule and stop at Feb. 19.

“Last year when we lost (77-60) at Colorado State,” Tapley said, “that whole plane ride home we just kept talking about how we couldn’t wait, couldn’t wait, to play them again here. We played them here and took care of business. Any time you play a team that you lost to, there’s always an extra, extra, extra amount of urgency.”